Making of Project Absentia - Part 1 - Making A Flashcore Game

Waffle Iron Studios' motto is "Home of Saturday Morning Slaughter". We aim to make cartoony games for a mature audience. Since 2021 we've been working on Project Absentia as a commercial endeavour in our spare time. During the early days the art style was rough, but with dedication PA's art style evolved into something some ouf our friends and colleagues dubbed "Flashcore".

Making a Flashcore Game with GZDoom (and later UZDoom)

The biggest challenge is drawing sprites for 5 (and sometimes 8) angles while keeping the enemy shape distinct. Also, both UZDoom and GZDoom before it do not allow vector graphics - so the next best thing was hi-res sprites drawn in Flash (or Animate in imperial units) and exported at around 512 x 512. Some sprites are bigger or smaller depending on the actual size of the enemy.

Variants of the high guards in Episode 1 and mobsters in Episode 2 have physical differences and slight colour changes, while still indicative of them being of the same overall type of enemy. Thus, there's no need for palette swaps - something hard to do with hi-res full coloured graphics in the engine.

We decided to experiment with making the weapons stand out more by giving them a cartoony, low-poly model look with brightmaps. For the upcoming Episode 2 update we're adding pickup effects and bobbing to the weapons, to help them stand out. Even if it's not flash graphics per se, it doesn't stand out too much in the end, with people finding the current beta-dev state to be quite cohesive yet unique.

And something in the Episode 2 update is we're doing a brightmap pass to make enemies stand out more. With vivid yet dark, moody coloured lighting, we wanna make sure enemies stand out solidly.

In short, a cartoony, ultraviolent game is what we set out to do, and we're making that happen, while taking care of certain accessibility concerns within our abilities with the engine we chose.

Influences

Project Absentia started as a pony game inspired by Rainbow Factory, a well known grimdark fanfic. When we wanted to make it a commercial project, we obviously had to go a different route. However, AuroraDawnRF, the author behind Rainbow Factory, gave the project his blessing, as long as we made some changes.

He did allow us to use some of his characters as a basis. It was his idea to make the pegasi into Angels, and he even came up with the Orkan Corp's logo. The logo is based on a symbol for tornado vortex signatures seen on some weathermap systems over the years.

As we devloped the story, one thing we definitely deviated from was the grimdark aspect. We ended up going a completely different direction, with Abby fighting with hope in her heart that things will work out in the end. We will continue that, while still maintaining the stakes being high, into Episode 2. Grimdark has its place, but we prefer Hopepunk in this dark, cynical world.

(Pictured above: A teaser drawing of one of the boss fights)

-SanyaWaffles